


Renascence

by salvage



Category: Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: Azure Moon Route, Canon-Typical Violence, F/M, Female My Unit | Byleth, Marriage Proposal, Mortal Savant Byleth, Oral Sex, Post-Timeskip | War Phase (Fire Emblem: Three Houses), Spoilers, This One's Soft Lads
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-15
Updated: 2020-09-22
Packaged: 2021-03-06 15:20:56
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 4
Words: 15,853
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26471038
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/salvage/pseuds/salvage
Summary: She hadn’t expected to find Dedue in the greenhouse, although she isn’t surprised to encounter him there. In truth, she is there because she had overheard a soldier admit to some nervousness about the war and she hoped that the relaxing scent of some lavender would soothe his worries, and that perhaps gathering it would soothe her own. She likes the greenhouse, its humid warmth, its scent of wet earth and fresh green growth, the glossy leaves and the bright flowers whose tender petals unfurl even in the dead of winter. It doesn’t get cold in central Fódlan the way it does in the northern parts she had frequented as a mercenary, it likely will not snow again this season, but there is still a bite to the early-morning air and when she steps into the greenhouse she pauses to adjust to its warmth and its wetness and its rich scent of growing things.
Relationships: Background Felix Hugo Fraldarius/Sylvain Jose Gautier, Dedue Molinaro/My Unit | Byleth
Comments: 8
Kudos: 58





	1. Chapter One

**Author's Note:**

> Hello! This is the first time I am posting a work in progress! It should update every few days or as long as editing takes. Thanks, as ever, to Suzelle.

The first time she sees Dedue again, she dies.

The Airmid River thunders below the Great Bridge of Myrddin, swollen with the early spring melts from the lower parts of the Oghma Mountains, drowning out the lower sounds of battle so that all the noises that rise above the thunder of the waters are sharp and urgent: the high-pitched howl of magic in the air, the ringing clash of sword and axe, the terrified screams of horses and of men. It is difficult to relay commands and request support over the incessant noise; now, more than ever, Byleth has to trust that her troops (her students, her _friends_ ) can handle themselves in battle. And yet somehow Dedue’s voice seems entirely separate from the crash of water and clash of weapons, as though it were not traveling across the chaotic distance between them so much as transported directly to her ears, to her mind, as Sothis’s used to be.

At the sound of his voice she turns instinctively, hair whipping about her face, and as she does so she feels the arrow pierce her tunic just below her collarbone and tear through the skin of her upper chest and the muscle underneath, the sleek metal of the arrowhead cutting a clean straight path through the vulnerable inner parts of her body. There is no pain, not yet, not so much as a feeling of hideous wrongness that screams through her arm and shoulder and chest, loud enough to drown out the clash of sword against lance and the crackle of magic in the air. Oh: there is the pain: the arrow’s momentum carries it through the muscle of her chest and it glances off the curve of one of her ribs; she feels the shock and drag of it as the shaft pulls at the tear the arrowhead made through her skin, ripping it further not with the careful precision of the finely honed metal blade but with the dull thickness of the arrow’s splintering shaft. And then the sharp searching tip of the arrowhead finds her stolen heart, unbeating, and cracks the stone lodged there; fine fractures lance all through it, splitting it within her. The Sublime Creator Sword slips from her fingers to clatter against the stone of the bridge, the supernatural red-orange glow of the blade darkening to an unremarkable off-white. 

Everyth i n g s l o w s —

Is it Sothis, who is now Byleth, catching the threads of time in her slim-fingered hands and manipulating them as deftly as a weaver at a loom? Or is it the desperate animal of Byleth’s body, loath to confront its mortality, grasping at each of its last moments like the thinning fibers of a thread on the verge of breaking? In the distance Annette’s hair blazes in the sun as she turns, attention perhaps caught by the loud clatter of the Sword; perhaps, too, turning at the sound of Dedue’s voice rising above the din of battle. 

Dedue—through the fluttering sea-green curtain of her hair she sees him, shield and axe, gleaming pauldrons extending the broadness of his shoulders. To Byleth it has been less than a year since the last time, but the few months between her abrupt return to this plane and this moment of Dedue’s low, strong voice carrying over the metallic clatter of weapons have been a set of glass bottles lined up along a windowsill, reflecting and refracting the sunlight but empty inside, easily shattered. 

Shattered—sounds become muted—Byleth’s vision seems to fracture—she sees the battle from above, pained faces, magic and metal, the blood-spattered stones of the bridge—her own lithe body crumpling, half-wrapped in the still-pristine shroud of her white cloak. Sothis’s hands catch the taut weft threads of time and unravel them, loosening and then unweaving time itself—Byleth’s dying body pauses in its ungraceful collapsing arc toward the ground—reverses course—the arrow retreats, closing the fissures it had split through the stone of her heart, setting her torn skin back together in its wake, leaving her body and spiraling back to the anonymous archer’s bow from whence it came. The Sword leaps into her hand and ignites. 

This time she is ready: Dedue says, “Your Highness,” the same way he always has, reverent and apologetic, as though Dimitri encompasses his whole world, and Byleth reaches up with the Seiros Shield to intercept the arrow that whistles through the air toward her. The arrow collides with the shield with the ringing crack of metal on metal and Byleth feels the impact jar up her arm. Now she turns. Annette’s hair is still sun-bright, illuminated by the aura of magic that hums in the air around her. Mercedes is just behind Felix but has turned, like Annette, toward Dedue, her hands flying up in surprise to cover her mouth. 

“Stay focused!” Byleth shouts, to herself as much as to the rest of them. She takes a moment to glance over the chaos on the bridge, weapons and armor gleaming in the light of the setting sun, yellow and red and deadly purple flashes of magic erupting intermittently through the crowd followed by shrieks and groans, the swoop of the pale golden wings of Ingrid’s pegasus stirring the banner of the Holy Kingdom of Faergus that flutters above all of them. Annette turns and, rising off the ground as magic courses through her body, sketches a sigil between herself and an imperial soldier, heat popping and sizzling in the air as she directs a burst of flame toward him. 

A cavalier charges toward Byleth, interrupting her survey of the battle, and she attacks without thinking: the Sword ignites and extends, the glowing vertebrae of its blade separating and whipping about, sizzling through the air above Byleth’s head and then in front of her toward the hapless cavalier. The Sword finds the cavalier’s body and wraps around her, its molten blade slicing through her armor and then, just as cleanly, her flesh. Its momentum sweeps the cavalier’s body off her horse and when her unmoving form lands on the ground her broken armor shatters, its polished fragments catching the sunlight as they scatter in all directions. The cavalier’s horse bolts past Byleth, screaming, eyes wide and mouth frothing, its hooves ringing loud as they meet the stone of the bridge. With a flick of Byleth’s wrist the blade of the Sword returns, jolting the dead body as it unwinds from around it. When Byleth turns, Dedue is beside her. 

“Reassuring,” Dedue says softly. He looks so much older, particularly with the silvery scars that mar his face: his forehead, his cheek, the corner of his mouth. His armor is beautiful, intricately patterned and brightly polished, but she can’t look away from his face, his scars and the familiar slope of his cheek, his strong jaw, his bright white hair and his pale eyes. Although there are more lines that fan out from the corners of his eyes that depthless green is the same as before, the soft look he gives her the same as before, unutterably dear, returned to her sight by some extraordinary mercy. 

Then that gaze darts away from her toward the front line of the battle and Byleth remembers where they are, sees, again, the bursts of magic and the glint of polished metal all around them, hears the clash of weapons and the screams of the dying. They charge forward together, shields up, the glow of the Sword to her right, the sun-kissed gleam of Dedue’s armor to her left.

❧

They take the bridge. By the time Ladislava falls to Shamir’s arrow the sun has nearly disappeared; the stone turrets of the bridge cast long shadows over all who remain on it, living and dead. They set to sorting through the bodies, healing those who can be healed, burying those who cannot. Byleth uses some of her own limited magic to heal a few soldiers with the Fraldarius crest on their armor, though even as she presses her hands to their wounds she is already thinking about which company to station on the bridge overnight, glancing about for Alois amidst the slow-moving shuffle of exhausted soldiers: he will know how many knights they can spare from the monastery; he will know, too, which soldiers will best support them in case of another attack by the Empire. She barely notices as the now-healed soldiers thank her, nodding absently as she walks away, eyes endlessly searching the crowds of people.

Seteth intercepts Byleth, gently pulling her away from the crowds of soldiers and healers who mill about on the bridge. She is grimy and her skin is sticky with dried sweat, her hair plastered to her forehead and the nape of her neck, but Seteth puts a hand on her shoulder despite that he will likely withdraw it smeared with a stranger’s blood. Seteth looks as weary as she feels, the left side of his armor scorched black by magical flames, hair in uncharacteristic disarray from the powerful wind stirred by the wings of his wyvern, but the look he gives her is so tender. 

“Go to him,” Seteth says. 

She doesn’t pretend she doesn’t know who he’s talking about. 

They both look toward the far side of the bridge, where Dedue and Dimitri are standing together, heads bent close. The rest of the Lions cluster together a respectful distance away, clearly impatient to greet Dedue; Annette is rocking back and forth on her toes and Ashe’s shoulders are trembling a little. Byleth watches as Dimitri and Dedue draw apart, which is signal enough to the rest of them to crowd Dedue. She can’t hear their voices above the rush of the river but joy is etched clearly on all of their faces. 

“They’re busy,” Byleth says to Seteth, not looking away from the group of them. 

Seteth takes his hand from his shoulder and moves it to her cheek, turning her face toward him; the gesture is affectionate, like that of a father, and it makes Byleth’s chest ache. “You’re part of that joy, too,” he tells her. 

She looks at Seteth, his tired eyes and his hair that could almost be black in the fading light. She tries to smile, and fails, and she takes his hand in both of her own and squeezes his fingers. “Have you seen Alois?” 

Seteth gazes at her for a long moment, equal parts fond and sad. He tells her where Alois is.

They set up camp in a field not far from the bridge, little groups of tents clustered around a few fires that fend off the late-spring chill. The success of the battle seems to echo the burgeoning feeling of spring in the air: though subdued, the atmosphere of the camp is optimistic, like the warm breezes of summer are finally within reach after a bitingly cold winter. Some of the monks are doling out a thick rabbit stew to quietly chattering groups of soldiers and bishops, knights and their pages, who stand or sit, steaming bowls in hand, in the circles of warmth around the campfires. 

Ever conscientious, Seteth had brought to Byleth’s tent a flannel and a basin full of heated water, but only some sullies can be washed away with a wet cloth. She remembers Ferdinand’s easy smile, the proud set of his shoulders, the gentle way he brushed the sweat and grime from the glossy coat of his horse. She remembers Lorenz’s carefully groomed hair. The excited light in his eyes when he mastered a particularly difficult spell. She sheds her armor and her cloak and the oppressive weight of the Sword. 

When she leaves her tent Byleth keeps to the shadows on the outskirts of the camp, away from the quiet comforting noise of people and the warmth of the fires, stopping in the deep shadow just behind a tent at the very edge of the group when her searching eyes finally find who she’s looking for. The barren landscape is faintly illuminated by the cool gray moonlight; the field in which they have set up camp is not flat but comprised of little low hillocks that recede into the distance, almost bare but for the prickly remains of last year’s dead grass. The dark unmoving mass of Dimitri’s cloak could be a rock protruding from the packed earth except for the long hilt and huge jagged spearhead of Areadbhar jutting too prominently from the gentle slopes of the plain. To see him like this, unnaturally still, alone but for his grief on the cold ground where nothing yet grows: she had not really known until her time at the monastery that there is a great river of sorrow within her, one whose banks she has only recently begun to tread but whose length and breadth are still unknown to her. Like the Airmid it floods and wanes, sometimes a trickle easy enough to tread across, sometimes rushing and roaring and white with waves. She wonders if all humans have a river like this and the rest of them have found ways to bridge their own, and it is only Byleth and Dimitri whose sadness seems to overflow the bounds of their rivers, tearing through the fragile structures they try to build across, dragging them down, drowning them again and again.

There comes from behind her a soft but immediately recognizable step. She stills. 

“He has changed,” Dedue says gently. 

She opens her mouth to speak but something in her throat seems to catch and close and there is heavy pressure and a sharp prickling feeling behind her eyes. She nods instead. It seems impossible to turn to look at him, but also impossible not to; she is a snared rabbit, throat noosed. 

“You… have not,” Dedue says. 

Dimitri sits, unmoving, his back to them, lance pointed to the sky as though he would fight even its vast expanse. 

“Where,” she tries, but her voice is a rough whisper. She swallows. Her throat feels—full, somehow. Her eyes still ache and prickle. “Where were you?” 

“I was looking for His Highness.” Dedue moves to her side. The night is clear and bright enough that she can see his profile when he steps into the moonlight, the straight line of his nose, his strong jaw. His long white hair seems to glow in the faint light. “I thought you were gone.” 

She was. There was no reason for him to return to Garreg Mach. She nods again.

“I am sorry,” he says, in the same way he speaks to Dimitri, reverent and apologetic, achingly soft. 

She finally recognizes the feeling that stings her eyes and clogs her throat. 

“I will leave you,” Dedue says, turning away from her, but she whips around and grabs his arm with both of her hands, surprising him into stillness. His forearm is huge and warm. He stares down at her. Even in the faint moonlight his eyes are so green. 

“Don’t,” she breathes. She blinks rapidly, her vision blurring, and a hot tear slides down her cheek. “Don’t, don’t leave,” she says, frantic, now, as though if Dedue goes back into the camp it will be like it was, the wound of his absence tearing open again, the bottles empty, her awful secret soul wondering why—of all of them—why it had to be—although she could never bring herself to complete the thought even in the privacy of her own mind. 

Dedue smiles at her. The scar that crosses the edge of his mouth twists with the movement and she wonders how it felt when the wound was fresh and new—whether he smiled then at all. He places his hand over hers on his arm; it engulfs hers completely and the skin of his palm is warm and rough with calluses. Strange that his closeness makes her want to cry more, not less, though she blinks back the tears with a furious flutter of her eyelids. She doesn’t know what to say to him, nor whether she even wants to say anything to him at all other than as a way to keep him here beside her for just a little while longer, solid and real under her hands, alive, so alive. 

“I do not plan on leaving again,” Dedue says with solemn intent. 

Byleth nods. “Good.” 

They look, together, at Dimitri, Byleth now leaning more heavily against Dedue’s side, his hand still clutching both of hers to his arm. She will have to return to the camp to talk strategy with Gilbert and Seteth and Alois; she will have to eat dinner and polish her armor and clean the blood from the cracks and the little hollows of the Sublime Creator Sword. But for now it is comfortable to stand beside Dedue like this, though they are both, in their own silent ways, uneasy about the battle, worried about Fódlan’s future, mourning for what Dimitri has become. For now, the warmth of Dedue’s body fends off the wintry coldness of the night air.

❧

She hadn’t expected to find Dedue in the greenhouse, although she isn’t surprised to encounter him there. In truth, she is there because she had overheard a soldier admit to some nervousness about the war and she hoped that the relaxing scent of some lavender would soothe his worries, and that perhaps gathering it would soothe her own. She likes the greenhouse, its humid warmth, its scent of wet earth and fresh green growth, the glossy leaves and the bright flowers whose tender petals unfurl even in the dead of winter. It doesn’t get cold in central Fódlan the way it does in the northern parts she had frequented as a mercenary, it likely will not snow again this season, but there is still a bite to the early-morning air and when she steps into the greenhouse she pauses to adjust to its warmth and its wetness and its rich scent of growing things.

Of course he is there. Mercedes told her that Dedue had been spending most of his time in the ruins of the cathedral, watching Dimitri sulk and pace into and out of the broken light that streamed in through the partly caved-in ceiling; Mercedes also implied that Dedue had been sleeping there, but Byleth knew that not to be true. The previous night, lying listless in bed, unable to sleep, she heard his familiar footfall pass outside her room, pause, and cross back to her door. She had held her breath. His footsteps retreated again and she heard the door to his room open and quietly close. She had told herself she was not disappointed.

But now he is here: kneeling on the floor of the greenhouse, head bowed, hands delving into the rich dark soil. In battle he is fierce, fearsome, eyes sharp, jaw set, and she admires the determination writ across his features. But he is not meant for that the way he is meant to be here, like this, among beautiful things, helping them to grow. 

“Here for the flowers again?” He asks her. 

“Not particularly,” she says; it’s the truth, but she feels strange to say it, like she’s letting him down. 

“You might as well have a look, while you are here.” 

She does not need to look at the flowers to know them. They are the Duscur blooms, thriving and healthy despite having been essentially abandoned for five years, despite having been transplanted so far from their home. They are sturdy but still delicate, little thick-leafed plants each dotted with dozens of tiny pink and orange and rust-red flowers. Dedue’s shoulders are broad. A lock of hair has escaped from the neat knot at the back of his head; on the cartilage curve of the ear it is tucked behind there is a smudge of dirt. 

Those big shoulders rise and fall with a sigh, and Dedue finally stands, brushing the dirt off his hands. Facing one another like this she has to tip her head back to look at him; his gaze is steady. “I have two things to say,” he begins. His voice is rich and deep; she thinks about the soil, where even the weakest seeds have a chance to grow. “First,” he says, “I thank you for supporting His Highness in my absence. But I must also admonish you for taking your own well-being too lightly. On several occasions, I have seen you protect others by putting yourself in harm’s way. I am grateful for your efforts, but I feel you should place a higher value on your own life. His Highness relies on you.” His expression softens. “As do I.” 

“I understand,” she says. It has never been difficult for her to hold eye contact with others; indeed, she has heard more than a few times that her gaze is unnerving. But Dedue looks at her as intently as she looks at him. It is a relief. 

“Then show that with your actions. We cannot afford to lose an invaluable asset like you. And…” Dedue pauses, finally looking away from her. 

She feels the prickle of anticipation. “And?” 

“This greenhouse would be a more lonely place without you in it. It would not be fair to the flowers, to leave me as their only caretaker.” 

She thinks about the greenhouse, the flowers, the careful hours she has spent kneeling on the dry and rocky soil to help them grow; her knees are very familiar with the jagged jut of the little pebbles that dot the coarse sand. The greenhouse keeper had, several weeks into her return to the monastery, left a little rectangle of folded burlap on the edge of the plot of flowers where they are now standing, but Byleth had not used it, even when her knees ached and turned red and then purple with bruises. She thinks of the Duscur blooms she had tended more carefully than they had required. 

“Hm,” Dedue hums. “Someday, I hope to show you a whole landscape of these flowers in full bloom.” 

The petals of hope unfurl within her. “You mean Duscur?”

“Yes.” She has never been looked at the way he looks at her. “Once this conflict is over, and His Highness ascends the throne, I believe it can be done. You must live at least until then. Understood?” 

She has mourned him for four months; he has mourned her for five years. She wants, so badly, to touch him: his face; his chest; even the wide back of his hand, rough knuckles, the soft little protrusions of veins that overlay the slim lines of bones that move under the skin. “Same to you.” 

“True enough,” he nods solemnly. “I had not thought much of my own life, until now, except that I would gladly cast it aside for His Highness. That is still true, but now I desire to see the end of this war. Until I can show you the fields of Duscur in bloom… I will go on living.” He says it like a vow.

She has never wanted anything the way she wants this. She has never wanted anyone the way she wants him. It feels like the desires of Sothis when Sothis was inside her yet separate from her own will, so that when Sothis wanted something Byleth could separate it from her own desires like thick, opaque white fat sliced carefully from a pink cut of meat: part of a whole, yet distinct within it. Her desire for Dedue is separate from her hopes for the future of Fódlan and her need to protect all those she cares about; it is neither forward-thinking nor altruistic, the way those desires are. It is instead a desire that lives nestled in the close hot space beside her basest needs, not her far-reaching hopes for the future but the selfish animal desire to simply continue living into this moment and the next: to be, to survive, to know that her consciousness will not end, not just yet. She wants him fiercely, wholly, his steadfast loyalty and his carefully chosen words, his broad shoulders and his scarred, gentle hands. 

“Good,” she says. 

When she plucks the first sprig of lavender her clumsy fingers break some of the tiny grayish-purple flowers, smearing its strong soothing scent over her skin. It isn’t enough to stop her hands from trembling.


	2. Chapter Two

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It's getting warm in here, lads, and not just because we are in the sauna. But we are also definitely in the sauna.

Dimitri does sleep in the cathedral, according to several reliable sources, one of whom is Dedue. Dedue spends much of his time there, sitting on one or another of the pews that has not been shattered, and sometimes Byleth joins him and they sit side by side in silence and watch over Dimitri. Sometimes he crouches or sits near the pile of rubble that has obliterated the apse and chancel; sometimes he paces the length of the transept, crossing from the east to the west door of the cathedral and then back again so swiftly that his heavy cloak flutters behind him, its matted fur collar obscuring the miserable slope of his shoulders. 

When Dedue leaves the drafty cathedral it is always for the greenhouse or the kitchen. He spends hours in the kitchen crafting complicated, labor-intensive meals: thick, savory stews; seared slabs of red meat with juicy centers; crisp steamed vegetables; tender, sweet young roots sautéed with herbs freshly plucked from the greenhouse. Mercedes teaches him to bake fluffy little rolls whose delicately domed tops brown where they are drizzled with a thick sweet glaze; the first batch come out lopsided and too dense but Byleth and Ingrid eat them all anyway, Byleth sitting on and Ingrid leaning against the long counter of the monastery’s kitchen, fingers and lips sticky, sugar-sweet. 

All the food that Dedue brings to the ruined cathedral Dimitri eats without expressing any emotion at all.

❧

Byleth has tea with Ignatz and training sessions with Felix; she pores over dense magic textbooks with Annette and spends hours in the stables watching Hapi feed and coo to the horses, her small hands soothing over their long manes and glossy coats. When she thinks too long about the war or Dimitri’s haunted stare or the fragile mortality of all those she loves she goes to the greenhouse and kneels in the damp earth from which fresh green shoots sprout, gets dirt under her nails and in the creases of her knuckles and the callus-worn divots in her palms. She used to like fishing for this purpose but now sometimes she pulls a writhing fish from the pond and its iridescent scales sparkle and glimmer in the sunlight as it thrashes desperately at the end of her line, its tender pink-lined gills fluttering in the air, its big blank eyes rolling in terror, and she is filled with an unaccountable dread. She still guts and eats the fish.

Sylvain convinces her to join him for dinner at a newly reopened tavern in town and they sit close together at a dark wooden table that is already sticky with spilt beer and eat little pies with flaky crusts and rich salty fillings of tender rabbit meat and sweet carrots. They drink a little too much and lean against one another on the uphill walk back to the monastery. Sylvain is tall and only a little unsteady beside her, his arm fitting comfortably around her shoulders, hers around his waist, and when Anna, packing up her wares for the day, spots them staggering through the gate together she winks. 

“It’s not like that,” Byleth should say, but she is tired and a little drunk so she winks back. It is worth it to see Anna’s face scrunch up in silent mirth. 

It does, however, set her mind down pathways she has long avoided and for good reason. She does not begrudge any of those who find comfort with one another but it has always seemed inappropriate for her to do the same, and moreover she has never been a person who has needed comfort in the same way others have. The way Felix and Sylvain gravitate toward one another in the aftermath of any battle, or how Shamir always first seeks out Catherine when she returns from a mission: it is a house whose warmth Byleth sees glowing through the windows but whose door she had always assumed was locked to her. But the continent is at war and Byleth has had to kill those she had deemed friends and every day she faces other friends with the knowledge that she might send them to their deaths as surely as if she had sunk the blade between their ribs with her own hand, and for four months she had known the precise tenor of the grief she will feel for the rest of her life if she never tries the doorknob. 

Yet Byleth’s life is not her own. Even from the very beginning her still, silent heart had assured that she would live at the behest of others: her mother’s willing sacrifice and Rhea’s unasked-for benefaction, the voice and the power of Sothis that are both now inextricable parts of her, the responsibility of the leadership of the Church of Seiros and the chaos of the Kingdom Dimitri has abandoned, the task of confronting the ever-encroaching murderous might of the Adrestian Empire, the students she has come to love who have placed in her trust not just their lives but their hopes for the future. These needs are so pressing and so, so much bigger than herself; how can there possibly be any space left for her own desires? 

So encountering Dedue in the sauna is a special kind of torture for Byleth, who has worked very hard to separate the selfish animal hunger she feels toward him from the impossibility of their circumstances and who, confronted with the sight of him there, skin flushed and aglow with sweat, his loose linen training clothes clinging to his muscular chest, feels all those carefully shored defenses begin to crumble. She nearly turns on her heel and flees, though that is conduct befitting neither a military commander nor a professor nor a former mercenary who had at the age of 12 earned the nickname Ashen Demon. 

“Professor,” he says, one eye slitting open to look at her. 

She nods to him and settles on the bench a companionable but polite distance from him. There are three other soldiers in the sauna, fresh from the training grounds if the rapidly purpling bruises on their arms and chests are any indication; they are all looking rather soaked through, though, and after a little while they leave together so it is just Byleth and Dedue and the steam that rises lazily from the sizzling rocks. 

Despite Byleth’s acute awareness of the nearness of Dedue it is comfortable to sit together with him in silence. She looks at him when she thinks she can get away with it: his thick arms, the dark skin marred with the raised lines of pale scar tissue; his handsome profile, the line of his nose and the soft curves of his plush lips; the fine strands of silver hair, curling in the humidity of the sauna, that have escaped from the neatly tied tail at the back of his head. She would give up all of Sothis’s power to keep them together in this moment forever with his forehead smooth and unworried and his hands relaxed and resting gently on his thighs. 

She is so focused on him she forgets herself almost entirely, so that when she catches him glancing at her and quickly looking away she doesn’t at first realize that she is likely flushed pink, chest heaving, lips parted, and that sweat has soaked through her thin shirt to plaster it to her breasts and stomach. It occurs to her only belatedly that they may be having similar thoughts. The sauna suddenly feels very warm and very close, intimate though there is space enough between them. Sweat trickles alongside her spine and down the bare undersides of her arms. The insides of her thighs feel hot. That only a few doors, easily opened, stand between the two of them and the rest of Garreg Mach, not just knights and mages and monks but those who know them perhaps best in the world, their friends and comrades in arms—to Byleth’s horror this thought piques her arousal instead of quashing it. 

Before Byleth came to Garreg Mach she had of course been aware of sex, not just the biological basics (though she still shuddered to think of the stilted, painfully awkward conversation Jeralt had had with her regarding the subject) but the knowing, deliberate exchange of looks and touches that so many of her fellow mercenaries engaged in, sometimes with one another, sometimes with near-strangers in the towns through which they passed. She knew it as one knows the sound of a language one does not understand: the cadence was recognizable but she couldn’t distinguish the words, nor could she use it herself. It had seemed an unnecessary complication so easy for her to forego she could not possibly imagine the utility of engaging in it. She does not necessarily feel differently now, but she thinks she can better understand the wild urgency with which she has seen others throw themselves into inadvisable entanglements or dubious trysts. It is a hunger that originates not from her stomach but from someplace deeper inside her, the breathless core of her chest and the hot slick place between her legs, and she feels it throughout her whole body, radiating out even to her extremities, her empty fingers that yearn to touch him. 

In the little bathing room outside the sauna she steps directly under the stream of cold water, gasping with the shock of it sluicing so suddenly over her overheated naked body. She dresses again in the Officer’s Academy uniform she wears at the monastery but the way the thin material of the blouse sticks to her still-damp skin recalls her sweat, and Dedue’s, in the humidity of the sauna. She quickly strips when she gets back to her room but then she is left with her body, the goosebumps that spring up over her chest and arms, her peaked nipples.

She touches herself tentatively at first, then with greater enthusiasm: a finger and then two slipped between the folds of her labia, the soft pad of one brushing the sensitive little protrusion of her clitoris again and again until her whole body is trembling with sensation. It is acceptable—pleasant, even—until she thinks of him, fingers easing closer to the unfamiliar aching spot that will allow them inside her, wet and wanting, and, possessed by some wild recklessness, presses them in, her soft inner walls fluttering against the intrusion. She gasps, fingers curling reflexively up, then moans as feeling jolts through her, rolling her hips against her own palm as her fingers hit some sweet spot that causes waves of pleasure to crash through her body.

She understands better now the recklessness with which others seek pleasure, but that does not place it within her grasp.

❧

Dimitri wants to march on Enbarr, so they will march on Enbarr. The plan is suicide. Even if they manage to breach the borders of the Adrestian Empire, there is no way their force as it is will reach the capital intact. Rodrigue pledges the soldiers of the Fraldarius territory and Alois pledges the Knights of Seiros but dread weighs heavily on Byleth as they prepare for the journey, loading wagons with tents and provisions and weapons and medical supplies. Medical supplies, though, are only of use to the living. She has seen most of them die: Felix’s skin singeing and burning under the red-orange glow of magical fire; the wide arc of Annette’s blood when the gleaming edge of a blade kisses her throat; sharp-toothed arrows sinking between the plates of Ingrid’s armor. She has seen Sylvain drown in his own blood and she has seen the pulsing pink viscera and spokes of white bone inside Ashe’s chest. It is only luck that has, thus far, allowed her to save all of them, and only luck that she has not had to make the impossible choice of saving one over another. Before each battle she prays but Sothis is silent as she has been for years. To whom do you pray when you are the goddess?

They go to war at Gronder and they kill even more of those they had once deemed friends: not just those fighting for the Empire but those with the Alliance, whom they have no reason to oppose. She is not so cruel as to send Ignatz into battle against his former housemates but it is still a war: she directs him to the western front of the battle, where he will at least face Imperial soldiers with whom he has never shared a meal. Bernadetta she sends with Ashe’s company of archers to the top of the ballista, pretending not to see that Bernadetta’s hands are shaking so hard she can barely nock an arrow. 

The aftermath of the battle is gruesome. They have won, for a certain meaning of the word, but the early-summer grass that had begun to spring up across the field is singed with fire and spattered with blood, crushed under the weight of boots and hooves and so, so many lifeless bodies. They count the dead; keep counting. Ingrid pulls Byleth aside to quietly inform her that Sylvain is throwing up into the river. She would be doing the same, she says matter-of-factly, if Hilda hadn’t retreated when she did. 

Byleth had entirely forgotten about the girl who had personally asked Dimitri to join their forces after the battle on the Great Bridge, begging to avenge her brother; at the time Byleth had been too distracted to really examine her motives. But when the girl steps from the group of soldiers milling about after the battle ends, a vicious light in her eyes, Byleth realizes what is about to happen a moment too late. The girl pulls a dagger from her sleeve and plunges it into Dimitri’s throat just above the dark line of his blood-spattered armor. Dimitri gags and chokes, Areadbhar falling from his hand as he reaches blindly up to the place where the dagger has sunk into the soft skin just above his collarbones. His blood spatters across the girl’s face as he tries to cough. Rodrigue steps in a moment too late, his sword meeting the girl’s arm with a great spurt of blood, but Dimitri is already collapsing to the hard-packed dirt of the battlefield. 

Byleth stops time. 

She lets Rodrigue die. 

This, like every other decision she makes while spattered with the blood of the battlefield, is a tactical choice. She hopes Felix would forgive her if he knew. She doubts it.

That it is raining during the entire trip back to Garreg Mach seems appropriate, if a little heavy-handed. Byleth can tell that Dimitri is undergoing some profound internal conflict; he stays separate from the group, the hem of his heavy cloak dragging through the mud behind him, but his eyes are no longer as haunted as they have been. Instead he surveys everything around them with the astute sharpness Byleth remembers from years past. He has made a decision. Byleth has no idea whether it’s the right one. Knowing the Dimitri she has known for the past few months, she doubts it. 

She was right not to trust him; she finds him in the stables the very night they return to the monastery, saddling a horse. He looks at her with such sadness the stone of her heart breaks anew as she talks to him, the rain plastering his hair to the sides of his gaunt face, running in rivulets down his cheeks and over his lips. It is more than she can possibly solve for him, his guilt and regret, the years he has spent convincing himself that this is the only way he is allowed to live. But when she extends her hand, palm up, cold rainwater sluicing down her arm—he takes it.

Things are easier, after that. Dimitri still looks pale and haunted and the slashes of his lance in the training grounds are more aggressive than they need to be. But he is there, sparring with Ingrid and Sylvain, and Byleth sees him in the dining hall with Mercedes and strolling the marketplace with Gilbert. When he spends time in the cathedral it is to pray. Felix informs her that Dimitri is sleeping in his own bedroom again; his tone is sharp and dismissive but his eyes are relieved. Preparing to recapture Fhirdiad is easier, too: as the knights and soldiers in the monastery prepare for their next battle it is with hope instead of resignation. 

Perhaps it is unwise to invite Dedue for tea in her quarters, the closed door guaranteeing no threat of interlopers, well-meaning or otherwise, intruding upon them. She purchases a handful of fragrant cinnamon sticks from a vendor in the monastery’s marketplace; even wrapped in a cloth their scent is spicy and delightful, and unwrapping the little package in her room she is near intoxicated by it. When she places the little palm-length curls of bark in her teapot and pours the boiling water over them the fragrance that blooms is not so sharp and instead brings out the rich depths of flavor that had hidden behind the overwhelmingly spicy scent. Dedue watches her prepare the tea in polite silence; as she moves about the small room, brushing past him to fetch the plate of little tea-cakes Mercedes had prepared earlier in the day with a knowing smile, the scent of cinnamon from the tea mingles with the alluring scent of his body. She wonders if he breathes as deeply in her wake as she does in his. 

Byleth sits and pours their tea, her sleeves tugging back from her slim wrists as she reaches across the table with one hand supporting the spout of the teapot and the other clutching its handle. The porcelain curve of the spout is hot to the touch; she readjusts her fingers until only her calluses touch it. Dedue lifts his teacup so delicately, his eyes fluttering closed as he breathes in the warm scent of cinnamon, and she watches him shamelessly: his pale eyelashes, his careful hands, the little upward tilt of his mouth that pulls lopsidedly at the scar that cuts across his lips. 

“This tea is my favorite,” he says. 

She knows.

They talk about the monastery, the caved-in ceiling of the cathedral and the huge cracks that now run through its intricately mosaicked floor, the familiar merchants hawking their wares in the marketplace. They talk about training and cooking and the way the early morning sunlight warms the greenhouse. They do not talk about the war directly, not at first, but it pervades their lives, as tragedy is wont to do, and there is no avoiding it in the end, as much as Byleth would like to stay in the warm quiet cinnamon-sweet cocoon of her room with him speaking only of stained glass and the soft fragile leaves of newly sprouting plants. 

“Everyone is saying His Highness is back to his old self, but I do not think that is accurate,” Dedue begins. Byleth’s stomach swoops with fear during the brief little pause he takes for breath; she knows just how fragile the new leaves of hope are, not only within her but throughout the population of the monastery entire. She curls her hand around her warm teacup for comfort. But Dedue continues: “What he was until recently is what he had been for as long as I've known him. So tortured by his compassion for the fallen that it had driven him mad.”

Byleth nods. The tenderness with which Dedue speaks of Dimitri’s sadness touches upon the river of sadness within her, too, and she feels it surge against the levees she has built to contain it. 

“He has always been too kind to be king,” Dedue says, shaking his head minutely. “He has always felt too much for the weak and the dead. That is exactly why I look up to him.” 

She does not remind Dedue that his own compassion is what has kept him by Dimitri’s side during these few months of Dimitri’s torrential sadness and gruff uncommunicative rage; that his kindness and steadfastness, even more than Dimitri’s, is worth looking up to. He would not believe her. Instead she reaches out across the table, her palms still warm from the teacup, to grasp his hand with both of hers. His fingers curl easily around her hand, pressing their palms together, his so much bigger but holding hers with an extraordinary gentleness. When she finally musters the courage to look back up at his face he smiles at her with that same gentleness. Perhaps there is another river within her, for this feeling, too, drowns her.


	3. Chapter Three

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Made myself cry writing this one; apologies in advance to any Linhardt lovers out there, I promise I love him too.

Fhirdiad is theirs and Dimitri is King, however reluctantly he accepts the crown. It weighs nearly as heavily upon him as his untamed grief did before but there is only so much Byleth and Dedue can carry for him. The others do their share as well: Sylvain and Felix venturing themselves into their families’ territories to quell unrest and gather forces; Ingrid working with Gilbert to organize their newly bolstered forces into discrete divisions, knights and soldiers, archers and cavaliers; Mercedes and Ashe setting up camps for refugees to provide them with food and shelter and medical attention. That Byleth is proud of them does not mean her heart breaks any less to see them take on these responsibilities, their eyes shadowed and mouths downturned with the exhaustion of this relentless war. So everyone is relieved when Claude asks for their assistance, some because they are simply pleased to ally with their former friends in the Alliance again, others, Byleth included, because having Claude’s sharp, calculating mind on their side can only improve their odds of winning this war. The added forces of even some Alliance territories could turn the tide entirely.

They march to Derdriu. 

They win again.

And then: Byleth and Dimitri are both utterly blindsided by Claude’s departure from Fódlan. Claude hands Failnaught to Byleth with a smile that they both know is more brittle than he intends and she and Dimitri stand side by side in stunned silence to watch Claude board his little sloop. A crew member wearing what looks like Almyran regalia takes up the gangplank. Failnaught is strangely light in Byleth’s hand. 

“Congratulations,” Byleth says faintly to Dimitri. 

“It’s all rather a lot,” Dimitri responds, sounding as lost as Byleth feels. 

With the inclusion of the former Leicester Alliance the Holy Kingdom of Faerghus now spans the width of the continent, from the Albinean Sea to Fódlan’s Throat, and more lords in the western territories seem to pledge fealty to King Dimitri each day. The end of the war feels achievable, though Byleth and Dimitri both know Edelgard too well to feel anything but trepidation about its final steps. Still: Fort Merceus lies just beyond Varley territory, through which Bernadetta’s uncharacteristically unwavering allegiance to Byleth will assure their passage. 

Of all her students, Byleth feels the most protective toward Bernadetta, particularly after learning about the way her father treated her. In light of what Bernadetta has experienced Byleth is glad that she leaves her room at all; each further accomplishment, from her prowess on the battlefield to the friendships she forms with Mercedes and Yuri and (to Byleth’s surprise) Felix to her increasing confidence in the classroom, fills Byleth with the pride she imagines a parent must feel when watching their child succeed. She hopes that they do not encounter Count von Varley when crossing through his territory, as she does not know whether she will be able to stop herself causing a diplomatic incident if they do. 

The Blue Sea Moon brings its characteristic warmth to Garreg Mach. Most residents of the monastery are glad for the heat of the sun and the drawn-out summer days, for the endless bounty of fresh leafy vegetables and the sweet ripeness of the peach currants and Noa fruit that grow in dense groves along the southern wall of the monastery. The five years during which the monastery was abandoned do not seem to have affected the fruit trees; if anything, they seem to yield more than ever, their gnarled branches heavy with thick leaves and plump ripe fruit and casting a shade almost as cool as that within the shadows of the cathedral. During the stifling height of summer afternoons Byleth takes to sitting in the shade of the trees beside the massive stone wall that encloses the monastery, plucking dark Noa fruits from the branches and breaking their thick glossy skins with her teeth, letting their juice run over her hands and down her wrists, licking it off, sticky sweet, a little sharp with sweat. 

Only Sylvain and Felix seem put out by the weather, which is natural, considering that they both grew up in the chilly northern reaches of Fódlan; perhaps, though, there is another reason they have mostly disappeared from everyone else’s company this moon and when they reappear they look rumpled and flushed, vaguely guilty for skipping training sessions and evening classes, clinging to one another despite the warmth in the air. Byleth lets it alone. She would not deny them the comfort they may take in one another.

They plan to conquer Fort Merceus in much the same manner as they conquered Arianrhod. It feels possible in a way many previous battles have not, but Merceus is still a fortress, pregnability notwithstanding, and they must properly prepare. Gilbert unfurls detailed maps and schematics over the dark-varnished hardwood tables of the Cardinal’s Room and he and Dimitri and Byleth pore over them well into the night. How they will break down the gate. How they will spread their troops across the heavily secured floor of the keep to methodically capture each quadrant of it. Whether they will have to fight demonic beasts. Whether they will have to fight friends. 

They do. 

Byleth and the battalion she leads have taken the west side of the fortress; she is supported by Constance and her battalion of dark fliers, magic sparking and crackling around them, the huge black wings of their pegasi stirring the air about all of them in great gusts. Constance herself takes out the first wave of fortress knights with a brutal blast of fire that leaves the company of knights screaming inside their heavy armor. The air around them shimmers with heat that is whipped by the wings of the pegasi into a blazing inferno that consumes the line of knights completely. It is difficult to tell whether the high-pitched howl in the air is the fire or the magic or the screaming. Some of the members of Byleth’s battalion throw shields of white magic to protect them from the heat but it still warms Byleth’s skin under the many layers of her Mortal Savant armor; the air around them smells of scorched metal and cooked meat. Byleth swallows against a wave of nausea. They move through the keep methodically, taking out waves of front-line infantry until they reach the heart of the structure. Byleth hears the roar of the demonic beast before she sees the creature, but glancing about the chaos of battle she sees something else first: the purple flash of magic and a familiar head of dark hair. 

“Oh,” she hears Constance say from her position just to Byleth’s right, her subdued daylight voice sinking even lower. “Another comrade.” Byleth had forgotten that Constance and Linhardt knew one another perhaps better than Constance knew many of the other students at Garreg Mach, for Linhardt himself had been to Abyss in what felt like another lifetime. The nausea threatens to rise up again within Byleth; she swallows, swallows again, her throat spasming with it. 

“Oh.” Linhardt echoes Constance’s distraught tone when he turns and recognizes them. He lowers his hands briefly, the complex runes of the spell he is casting flickering and fading in the air between them so that Byleth can see him properly, his furrowed brow, the long hair that frames his face, its soft ends stirring with the gusts sent up by the pegasus’s wings. “Ever since returning to the Empire, I knew this day would arrive,” he says.

“Linhardt,” Byleth says, helplessly. 

Linhardt sighs. “I just hoped it might take a bit longer.” He moves his hands again and the glowing runes of his spell spring back into life, magic crackling through the air before him. 

Byleth dodges, the teeth of her geta skidding against the smooth stone floor of the keep; the blast of low-level fire magic misses her but catches two members of her battalion. She hears their screams as though from a distance. She doesn’t want to do this; from the level of magic Linhardt has used, he doesn’t, either. 

“We don’t have to do this, Linhardt,” Byleth calls to him. 

“We do,” Linhardt says sadly, and space between them shimmers with magic.

Byleth springs up, the Sublime Creator Sword glowing with power in her hands. She will give him this, if nothing else. He sketches a magical shield but it is too weak for the power of the sword and she slices through the runes like they are delicate glittering charms his deft fingers had hung in the air. The Sword sinks into his left shoulder, the thin layers of his mage’s robes offering no resistance at all to its blade. She feels the give of flesh and muscle, his thin collarbone snapping neatly in two, his scapula shattering messily. His eyes are wide. The blade sinks into his body, carving through the resistant spokes of his ribs and all the soft vulnerable parts of his body they protect, his thick arteries, his lungs and heart. The sword sweeps through his chest in a neat curve, following the line of his lowest rib to exit at the right side of his waist. His black and green robes fall apart to reveal a mess of red viscera that he presses his pale hands to as though he could stop this. He slumps heavily to the ground. 

Byleth falls to her knees before him, the Sword clattering beside her as she pulls his limp body into her lap. “Linhardt,” she says, voice trembling. “Linhardt.” 

“Professor,” Linhardt says weakly. His lips are speckled with blood. “It was nice to see you again.” 

Byleth places her hand over his. She cannot heal this.

Linhardt’s whole body shudders as he tries to take a breath with his ruined lungs. His eyes are already unfocused, lids lowering like he’s about to fall asleep. Byleth leans her face close to his to listen to his weak voice. “I hope, someday, there will be no fighting,” he whispers to her, “and we can all just… nap the afternoon away.” 

When Byleth grabs the hilt of the Sword again her hand is slick with blood.

❧

After the battle ends Dedue finds her retching into the low shrubs outside the walls of Fort Merceus. She has torn off the ornate harness that holds her swords against her back, her wide obi, her hon kozane dō and kusazuri and her heavy wide-sleeved haori; they are scattered across the grass a short distance away from her. Her undershirt is plastered to her clammy skin with sweat. Her legs and feet ache from crouching for so long. She spits into the shrubs. Her mouth tastes sour. She spits again.

“I’ll be right there,” she rasps without turning around. 

Dedue approaches her slowly. “They don’t need you for the moment,” he says. “I came to see if you were all right.” 

Byleth tries to laugh but instead her voice hitches on a sob. Dedue crosses the little distance between them and kneels beside her, placing a hand on her back. She can’t bring herself to look at him. “Sorry,” she says. 

“I am so sorry you had to do that,” Dedue says, and he carefully gathers her into his arms. After a moment of resistance she slumps against him and he holds her as she falls apart. 

It seems as though she may never stop crying once she has truly started. Her whole body twitches and spasms against his as sobs wrack her but he doesn’t move at all except to settle her more comfortably against his chest, her tear-streaked face tucked into the curve of his throat. She is weak with it, her limbs uncooperative and useless; she can barely even tighten her hand around a fistful of the sleeve of the loose clean shirt he wears. He supports her entirely, holding her steady.

When her sobs subside to intermittent sniffles he produces a handkerchief and she blows her nose messily into it, wincing a little, but he just continues carding his fingers gently through her hair. Her face feels hot and swollen. “Sorry,” she says again, though it feels inadequate. 

“There is nothing to be sorry for,” Dedue says. She can feel the vibration of his voice where her cheek is pressed to his chest. “War requires unconscionable acts of us.” 

She nods, but the motion just fits her head more comfortably beneath his chin and, overwhelmed with emotion and exhausted from her breakdown, she instinctively nuzzles closer to the bare line of his throat. His breath stirs the hair at the crown of her head and she feels a soft touch there. 

Only a little while longer, she tells herself. They are almost at Enbarr. This war will only go on a little while longer. She can sit like this, comfortable and protected in his arms, only a little while longer.

❧

It seems to happen very quickly after that. They take Enbarr, moving systematically through the city to capture those who can be captured and kill those who leave them no choice. Byleth recognizes the dumb blank faces of the artifically created demonic beasts they fight: choice was stripped from them long before they were sent into battle. Killing them still does not feel like mercy.

Choice was, perhaps, also stripped from Hubert by the fact of his birth, Byleth thinks, facing him across a plaza at the heart of Enbarr paved with white stones that reflect the strong southern sunlight painfully into her eyes. Hubert’s black-robed figure looks strangely, unnaturally dark silhouetted against the bright plaza, as though the light is avoiding him entirely. But the Sword glows with its own unnatural light and in the brief moment when it is close to Hubert’s face it illuminates with its strange red glow the sharp line of his jaw and his high cheekbone. His visible eye is in shadow but the white still looks very bright. 

She slits his throat. His blood shines darkly where it spatters in a wide arc across the light stones of the plaza.

And then there is nothing left but the palace. They send their platoons to capture the city as peacefully as possible, Dimitri very seriously explaining to as many soldiers as he encounters that there is to be no needless killing, no looting nor pillaging. After the din of battle and with the majority of Kingdom soldiers spread out across Enbarr it is eerily quiet in the huge plaza outside the Imperial Palace. The plaza is laid with tiles that create a complicated geometric pattern; from a pegasus or a wyvern, high above the plaza, one might be able to see the design entire.

They have gathered, unbidden, there: before the palace, before the end. The sun warms Byleth in her dark clothes. Annette’s cheeks and nose are flushed pink, perhaps from exhilaration, perhaps sunburned. A recently healed gash spans almost the entire length of her upper arm, curving from her shoulder to the joint of her elbow. The lower part of her arm is drenched in blood that has dried and begun to flake. There is a little arc of blood spattered across Felix’s left cheek. Sweat has run rivulets through the smudges of ash on Sylvain’s face. The white fur of Mercedes’ gremory shawl is matted and marred with sweat and ash. The front of her skirt is soaked with blood.

Byleth thinks about Hubert and about Linhardt. She thinks about Sylvain, throwing up into the river, still holding Leonie’s necklace. She thinks about Edelgard: she will kill her with her own hand if it will spare Dimitri the pain. 

“Edelgard awaits us,” Dimitri says, looking toward the palace, which rises from the white paving stones like a sheer cliff face before them. “We will advance our main forces straight to the palace.” 

“We can win this,” Byleth says. She thinks about the effort it requires to tap into Sothis’s power to reverse the flow of time; she thinks about the springtime rush of the Airmid River. They all chime in after that, pledging their support to Dimitri, promising to win this war, but she barely hears them. She looks at Dedue, standing behind Annette, his armor dull with dust and spattered with gore. She will do anything to not lose any of them. 

The palace has an ornate façade boasting dozens of slim stories-high columns, all of which support a huge frieze that is patterned with complicated intertwined creatures that seem to twist and writhe before Byleth’s eyes, trapped in pale marble but reaching with uncountable grasping limbs toward the indifferent sky. Extending behind the frieze, nearly black when backlit with the afternoon sunlight, is the series of turrets that line the outside walls, their thin pointed peaks spiraling up and up. The inside of the palace is just as elaborate as the outside, massive polished pillars, gleaming marble floors laid with huge intricately patterned rugs. When their armored boots or horses’ shod hooves stray from the plush rugs their footsteps ring out between the distant walls, back and forth and back again until it is nearly impossible to tell where the front lines of battle are. 

Did it always have to come to this? Edelgard’s body is huge and grotesque, distorted beyond recognition, hovering above the throne and dais as her monstrous arms send crackling bolts of magic toward both limbs of their encroaching force. The warm afternoon sunlight that streams through the windows illuminates from behind Edelgard’s huge black wings and the golden horned crown she still wears on her tangled white hair. When she speaks the sound booms through the throne room, drowning out even the echoing sounds of weapons clashing so there is only her, her rage, the thing she has become. 

The rest of them hang back when the huge thing dissipates like ash flaking into the air and she collapses, becoming again the tiny pale form of Edelgard, just Edelgard again, slumped under the pristine layers of her red cloak and armor. Only Dimitri and Byleth approach her. Someone is trying to suppress tears but the little sniffles and squeaks they are making seem very loud in the big quiet room. 

“El,” Dimitri says softly, full of hope. 

He extends his hand to Edelgard. 

Byleth readies the Sword. 

She does not need it. There is a muffled wet sound as Edelgard throws the dagger Dimitri had given her back at him, off-center so that it hits his shoulder instead of his chest; simultaneously, Dimitri swings Areadbhar forward with a sharp quick motion. The room is quiet. Edelgard slumps face-first onto the ground. 

It was Bernadetta who was crying: she is crying, still, tears slipping over her cheeks, her round young face pink with it. Mercedes and Ashe step in front of her to obscure her view, their arms around her, and she collapses against them, her slim body heaving with great silent sobs. Ashe is crying, too, quietly and unobtrusively, even as he consoles Bernadetta. Felix and Annette flank the three of them, hands on their backs, gently guiding them out of the throne room. 

Byleth sheathes the Sword and turns, following the others. Behind her, she hears the pained grunt and slick wet noise of Dimitri pulling the dagger out of his own shoulder. He drops it to the carpeted floor in front of Edelgard’s body. 

The war is over. The war is over. It rings in Byleth’s head like the clanging of bells: the war is over, it is over, it is over, over, over. The light from the plaza seems so bright as it streams through the open door. Had they only just been outside in that plaza, squinting at the reflection of the sun on the pale stones, preparing for this final confrontation? Byleth can hardly imagine stepping back out into that sunlight. Next to her, Dimitri falters. The light illuminates his golden hair and glints off the panels of his armor that are not stained dark with blood or viscera. He turns back, toward the dark throne room, toward the sprawled still form of Edelgard’s body—Byleth catches his hand and he glances up at her face. She wishes she could allow him to mourn. 

Together, they step into the sunlight.


	4. Chapter Four

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is the end! Thank you for joining me on this journey, friends! I am on Twitter @esteemedmothman

Byleth keeps returning to her old bedroom. 

Rhea has abdicated the position of Archbishop of the Church of Seiros, passing the mantle to Byleth, to no one’s real surprise. Seteth and Flayn and Gilbert take on some of her new responsibilities and they all delegate as much as they can to trusted bishops and other officials throughout Fódlan but there is still a relentless onslaught of work to be done. Their most pressing task, as Byleth sees it, is supporting and rebuilding the branches of the church and the believers who had been violently suppressed throughout the former Adrestian Empire. Some churches had been looted or forcibly repurposed; some had been razed entirely. Some of the faithful had been persecuted, forced to go into hiding or disavow their beliefs. Some had been killed. Byleth works to send them coin when they need it and provisions when they don’t, offers shelter to those who have been driven from their homes and building materials to those who wish to return, assigns out-of-work craftspeople to the creation of magnificent stained glass windows and huge paintings and sculptures to inspire those who are reestablishing their faith in Sothis. She sends so many books on art and craft and animal husbandry and crop rotation to distant villages that Seteth takes her into the Advisory Room to give her a stern talking-to about the value and rarity of some of the tomes in the Garreg Mach library’s collection. 

And at the end of each long day of paperwork and planning, audiences with tearful believers and surly government officials and recalcitrant bishops, Byleth leaves the Audience Chamber on the second floor of the monastery and heads downstairs, instead of up to the third floor. The Archbishop’s Room is big and lavish and, although she had Cyril trade the mattress from her original bedroom for the too-soft new one and paid him a handful of gold for his trouble, it still does not feel like her own. But now the mattress in her old room is too soft so she finds herself wandering the monastery at night, walking past the still surface of the fishing pond and the reflective walls of the greenhouse and the silent dining hall, drifting through the mostly empty students’ quarters like a ghost. Her footsteps echo loudly in the vast space of the almost-rebuilt cathedral. Sometimes she goes to the graveyard and perches on the waist-high wall beside her father’s grave, kicking her heels gently against the uneven stones of the wall on the clear nights when the waning Horsebow moon and then the waxing Wyvern moon cast their cool silvery light over the monastery. 

A few times she encounters others during her nightly walks. Yuri, once, supervising the transport of a few huge boxes out of Abyss; she doesn’t ask, but he winks at her when he notices her hanging back near the stairs that lead to the sauna. Ignatz, another time: the door to his room is ajar and warm yellow light spills out over the stone and shrubs and grass of the dormitory quarters and Byleth knocks, gently, with just one knuckle. He is sketching; he had lost track of time, he says a little sheepishly, and when she asks to see what he is working on she is stunned to see a rough but recognizable depiction of herself as Sothis, palms upturned, haloed by light. 

“Oh,” she says. 

Ignatz’s face falls. “I’m sorry,” he says, wringing his charcoal-smudged hands before him, “I’m so sorry, I didn’t think, I can throw it out, I just—”

“No!” Byleth says, forcefully enough to surprise the both of them. They stare at one another for a moment. “No,” she repeats, quieter. “It’s beautiful.” 

He blushes and looks away. 

“Just… make it look a little less like me.” 

Ignatz laughs, a sweet lilting sound that abruptly and to Byleth’s surprise brings tears to her eyes. He survived the war; she sent him, so young, armed with sword and bow, into the ugly violent mess of battle and he emerged still able to laugh like this, still able to create beautiful things, his loose white shirt spattered with the vibrant greens and blues of the paints he uses. 

When she hugs him he hugs her back immediately, so much taller than he used to be, probably getting paint and charcoal all over her embroidered housecoat. 

Others come and go from the monastery. Ashe and Mercedes spend a good deal of time there coordinating the distribution of relief supplies throughout the kingdom. Constance uses it as a home base during her campaign to restore House Nuvelle, flying every week or so between Fhirdiad and Enbarr and Nuvelle territory on her trusted black pegasus, Crème Brûlée, who was almost certainly named by Hapi. Hanneman splits his time between the monastery and Enbarr at Byleth’s behest, conducting research on how the Empire was able to manufacture artificial Crest Stones and how they were used to create demonic beasts. She will not let that gruesome fate befall anyone else. 

Sylvain writes her often, to her surprise and delight; he updates her weekly on the state of Gautier territory, the rebuilding of Fhirdiad, how Dimitri is adjusting to his new title, the sheer delight that Ingrid radiates having pledged herself as Knight to House Blaiddyd. He writes about how Gilbert is supporting Dimitri in administering to the Kingdom’s needs, and about how Dedue is administering to Dimitri’s own. He writes about Annette, who has taken a teaching position at the Fhirdiad School of Sorcery but has not yet reconciled with Gilbert. He writes, too, about Felix, about the harvests in Fraldarius territory, about how Felix has stepped into the role Rodrigue once served for Lambert, albeit with much more scowling and grumbling. Sylvain’s affection for Felix shines through every missive. 

She allows herself to miss them when she walks at night. It is the only time she has to be alone with her thoughts, and her thoughts, more often than not, turn toward her memories of each place she passes when she walks: Sylvain in the stables; Mercedes in the tea garden; Dimitri, uncomfortable in his Ball regalia, lingering on the lawn of the Officer’s Academy to avoid the Reception Hall. She understands even more now than she had at the time his reticence, but even then she had felt much the same: overwhelmed by the hot press of bodies, the noise of music, the bright glow of candles, the rich scent of food and wine. It seemed as though she had danced with everyone at the monastery that night—almost everyone.

“I do not know how to dance,” Dedue had told her as they stood so close together in the cool quiet of the Goddess Tower, illuminated by the bright clear light of the Ethereal Moon. “If you wish to teach me, then I will endeavor to learn.” 

But she had not, and she had refused his coat as they descended together from the quiet tower to the hot loud Reception Hall, taking care not to wrap her arms around herself although she was, indeed, cold. And then they were both distracted, Byleth swept up in another round of dancing, Dedue pulled aside by a desperate-to-escape Dimitri, and she had lost sight of him for the evening until she finally escaped the reception hall altogether. When she had returned to her room that evening she had seen a faint light shining through the gaps around the door to his room. She had not knocked. 

She finds herself climbing those stairs again. 

Even in the silvery light of the waning Wyvern moon the gently rolling hills that slope away from the monastery look lush, not trampled to a hard pack by the careless boots of innumerable soldiers nor scorched to an inhospitable crust by cruel bursts of murderous magic, but churned by the gentle blades of horse- and oxen-drawn ploughs to once again cultivate newly growing life. The growing season is over, wheat reaped and apples plucked, but the land still seems full and rich with the promise of next year’s harvest and the one after that. It is only the unadorned inside of the Goddess Tower that is empty and bare. It has always been so: a strange place to be associated with a legend about love and wishes, Byleth has always thought, particularly during the Ethereal Moon, when the perpetually open doorway to its little terrace allows the biting winter air to pervade the upper chamber of the Tower. 

What if she had taken his coat, all those years ago?

Now there are footsteps that echo up the long column of the tower, likely Seteth, chastising her again for wandering during the night, or perhaps Mercedes, who is uncannily good at predicting where Byleth will be during her wanderings even when Byleth herself does not see any reason to be where she is. Yet the steps as they approach are too heavy for Mercedes, and even for Seteth, who is rather slight and likes to wear soft-soled boots. For an insane moment Byleth wonders whether, if she stands very still, she can blend in with the deep shadows in the far corners of the empty chamber in order to avoid talking to whoever is here.

And yet she remains standing, silhouetted by moonlight, in the doorway between the chamber and the little moon-drenched terrace, and when she looks over to the stairwell: 

“I've finally found you,” Dedue says, hesitating at the entrance to the chamber, his soft and solemn voice carrying across the open space between them. 

She stares at him.

He goes to her side, standing at the other side of the doorway and looking out onto the terrace, the fields, the wide clear expanse of the night sky. “It is a fine night. The stars seem closer than usual. Just like last time…” 

“I thought you were in Fhirdiad,” Byleth says numbly. She is still unsure he is not a spirit conjured from the strange too-bright slant of the cool moonlight over the ancient stone of the Tower, brought to life by the confused jumble of her wistful memories and her fervent desire. That he would reference the very night she was thinking about with such regret seems to confirm her fears, rather than allay them. She longs to reach out and touch him: his freshly shorn hair, the pearly scar that cuts through his lip, even the traveling cloak he still wears, its hem discolored with the dust of the road.

“I needed to speak with you,” he says. 

“With me?” 

“Yes. When I left the capital, I told His Majesty I would be leaving his service.” 

“What?!” Byleth cannot help but blurt, too loud for the little space between them. 

He looks away from her again, to the terrace and the moonlit landscape, the long plots of farmland flush with the wild plants that farmers cultivate between harvests to keep the soil rich and healthy, stretching from the walls of the monastery all the way to Fhirdiad. Whatever he is thinking about brings a sweet smile to his face. “He accepted my decision with a smile. I do not think I have finally accepted it myself yet, to be honest.” 

“Why—” Byleth’s voice catches in her throat; she tries again to speak. “Why would you leave him?” 

Dedue looks at her with such fondness. “It was all so that I could give you… this.” He drops to one knee in front of her, opening one of his big hands to reveal the moonlit glimmer of a little silver ring. “I have come to ask for your hand in marriage. I adore you,” he says with quiet conviction. “I understand that, as the new archbishop, you cannot take marriage lightly. But even in the face of rejection, I cannot leave these words unspoken.” Byleth’s own words have fled her; she looks at him blankly. “May I have your answer?” 

She realizes she still hasn’t said anything. She feels weightless. “I accept.” 

“You do? You… will marry me?” 

_Of course,_ she wants to say, but the words get caught up inside her again and all she can do is nod. She crosses the little distance between him and blindly presses her hands into his, tangling their fingers together; his hands are so big and so warm around hers. The little circle of the ring is pressed between their palms. They stare at one another, hands entwined, in the silent upper chamber of the Goddess Tower, under the cool light of the moon. It illuminates the slope of his cheek and the plush curve of his lower lip. She loves him; she is in love with him.

“I am not good with words. Would you really have me, uninteresting as I am?”

Byleth almost laughs; she feels radiant. “I would have you just as you are.” 

“I see,” he says, a sweet little tremor running through his voice, and then he ducks his head a little, embarrassed. “Why are you making that face? Is it so odd to see me laugh? 

“You have a wonderful smile.”

“I see,” he says again. He sounds flustered, like this is not where he expected this conversation to end up but he is forging ahead regardless. “Well then.” He stands, remarkably gracefully for that he is still holding her hands in both of his. The point of contact feels so warm. “I have one more request. I know it is sudden, but will you prepare to depart on a journey?” 

She would go anywhere with him. “A journey?” She echoes. They are standing very close together; she has to tip her head rather far back to look up at him. She never wants to look anywhere else for the rest of her life.

“I told you once before that I would like to show you the fields of Duscur in bloom. I know that you cannot leave the monastery for long due to your position, but—” 

“I can't wait to see them.”

He smiles at her. “I am excited also. To show you the flowers as they are meant to be seen, in my homeland… and to be by your side in all the days to come,” he continues quietly. He turns their hands, fumbling for a moment with the ring; she realizes his hands are trembling slightly. 

That little, charmingly human expression of nervousness breaks open the dam of emotion within her and she surges up kiss him, their hands still caught between their bodies as she presses close, chest to chest, breathing in: the dust of the road and the animal scent of the horse he had ridden from Fhirdiad to the monastery; the crisp late-autumn air; end-of-the-day sweat and the familiar base scent of his body. His lips are soft and yielding when she meets them with her own in a brief, chaste kiss. She stills as though shocked by her own impudence, their mouths a breath apart, and she can feel how their hands are still clasped tight in the hollow between their stomachs, how her breasts are pressed against his chest. She can feel each breath he takes. His lips are plush and warm when they move against hers, gently at first, a series of light hesitant touches so soft that she cannot tell when the kiss ends and the next one begins again, only that she can feel the quick shallow breaths he is taking between each tentative touch. 

They draw apart just enough to look at one another. She blinks slowly, as though waking up from a dream, but he is still there, cheeks flushed, looking at her as though there is nothing else in the whole world.

“Yes,” he says into the quiet breathless space between them, “it is a fine night, indeed.” 

When they kiss again it is surer, the press of his lips fuller against hers, and one of his hands slips from the sweat-damp tangle tucked awkwardly between them and wraps around her waist to steady her against him. His hand feels so broad, as though it could spread to encompass her whole waist, and the thought has her rising up on her toes and parting her lips to his, deepening the kiss, her tongue first simply tasting the curve of his lower lip and then delving into the slick inside of his mouth, and his into hers; she wants to know this sensitive and intimate part of him, the warmth of his lips and the heat of his tongue, how he gasps and trembles against her when she gently sucks his lower lip into her mouth, and she wants to know the rest of him, his hands and his throat and the shell of each ear, the soft glossy mounds of the scars that mar his cheek and the cleft of his chin. The muscular curves of his chest and his taut belly against which her knuckles press despite his layers of traveling clothing. 

They separate again, his eyes tracking over her face, and when he finds whatever he was looking for there he smiles so tenderly that she has to kiss him again, softly like the first time, their mouths fitting sweetly together.

“It is cold,” he says. He kisses her again. “You should go back indoors.” 

“Only if you are with me.” 

“Always.”

❧

Things escalate rather drastically, after that.

They descend from the tower and cross the wide empty plaza outside the cathedral and then the bridge, from which they can see in the distance the dark silhouettes of the Oghma mountains against the clear star-speckled indigo sky. The monastery is still and quiet and illuminated in shades of cool silver by the thick crescent of the moon. Byleth does not let go of Dedue’s hand. Their bodies brush in the close spaces of the stairwells that lead to the second and then the third floor and a thrill passes through her each time she feels the warmth and the unfamiliar planes of his body against her upper arm or the curve of her hip: at the closeness and at the knowledge that they will be closer still. 

In the Archbishop’s Room, which is now her room, Dedue glances around and comments, “Homey,” in such a deadpan way that she laughs, unexpectedly, the high bright sound echoing between the unadorned walls of the room. _Oh_ , she thinks: how she loves him. 

It is with joy that she takes his face in her hands and kisses him again, again, not just the soft curves of his lips but his high cheekbone and the scarred slope of his jaw and the tip of his nose and the line of one eyebrow, each eyelid, delicately, as he closes them for her, and he delves his hands into her hair and kisses her in turn, her lips and forehead and blissfully closed eyelids, the curves of her cheeks, plump from smiling. His palms are broad and rough where they cradle her jaw and she dips her chin down to kiss them, too, the callused heels of his hands and then the thin skin at the hot hollows of his wrists, the slim delicate protrusions of tendons and veins. 

When she goes to unfasten his cloak she notices the glint of the silver ring she now wears on her third finger, the simple yet elegant setting that hosts the small, perfect green stone, and she becomes momentarily distracted, her fingers fumbling uselessly with the clasp that holds the cloak closed over his collarbone: this is hers, she thinks, as she is his. Then she succeeds at unfastening the little hook from the ornate eye of the clasp and the cloak falls heavily to the floor and they are that much closer, his light traveling armor and tunic, her embroidered housecoat and thin underclothes. He unties the sash from around her waist and the housecoat falls open; with an elegant little roll of her shoulders she shrugs it off and it, too, falls to the floor around their feet. After that they are scrabbling at one another’s clothes, his armor, her chemise, revealing his thick arms and broad shoulders and her soft breasts and the slope of her waist, the plump glossy new scars that crisscross his body and the thin old misshapen one above her heart. She, too, has her share of battle scars, the tissue dark against her skin where his is light, and they run wondering hands over the tender topography of one another’s scars, arms and thighs, chests and backs, and when she dips her head to kiss the deep line carved through one of his pectorals he shivers, big hands clasping her slim upper arms. 

Dedue gasps when she flicks the tip of her tongue across the thickest point of the scar on his chest so she does it again, opening her mouth to his skin, and he sighs and writhes beneath her. The slick texture of the scar is strange under her lips. She traces it up to his shoulder, to the twisted starburst shape that radiates little branching rivulets of scar tissue all down his arm, the telltale Lichtenberg patterns of magic, and she kisses these, too, laps at the faint edges of the scars where they become indistinguishable from the smooth skin at the underside of his arm. And he tastes her skin in turn: the old training injuries that stripe her forearms, the mottled burn that stretches across her right flank, the unbroken unscarred skin beneath her collarbone where she still remembers the arrow piercing her body that day so many months ago on the Great Bridge of Myrddin. She wants to tell him about that day, the river and his voice, the sharp path the arrowhead tore through the muscle of her chest, but when she opens her mouth to speak he moves to her breast, soft lips to the sensitive peak of her nipple, and words flee her. 

They twine their bodies together on the soft bed: chest to chest, her arms around his neck, the inside of her thigh sliding up his hip. She is wet between her legs and she can feel against the soft flesh of her hip the insistent press of his cock but hot slide of skin against skin satisfies enough of her longing for the moment and they kiss, kiss again, his tongue delving into her mouth. The close-shaved sides of his head are prickly when she flattens her palms to them, rubbing first with and then against the grain, and she threads her fingers through the long hair at the crown of his head to loose it from its tie, silken silver strands falling about both of their faces. The callused skin of her palms slides over the soft cartilage curves of his ears as he ducks his head down to kiss her throat, her collarbone, the scar above her heart. 

Byleth arches up toward his hot mouth and mobile hands as he moves down her body, tangling her fingers in his hair, holding him to her as he nips at the little curve of her stomach and the peak of one hipbone. The familiar topography of her own body feels strange and new when he touches her, and when she looks down at him she sees as though for the first time the sideways slopes of her breasts, the flat of her sternum, her taut belly and the round curves of her hips and thighs and the soft dark curls of hair between her legs. He touches her carefully at first, dipping the tips of his fingers between the slick folds of her sex, the pad of his thumb brushing over her clitoris until she is shaking against him, thighs tightening around his body, hitching her hips up and up against his fingers and breathing out quiet little high-pitched moans. As she becomes more desperate he touches her with more confidence, working her clitoris while also separating the plump petals of her labia to expose the wet wanting core of her. 

“Please,” she gasps, and he enters her with one finger, his palm fitted to the curve of her pubic bone, curling his finger up toward her belly until she bucks and moans and clutches at his hair. He withdraws his finger from her and she sobs at the loss until he presses into her with two now, the thicker width filling her, again curling his fingertips up toward that soft spot inside that wrings pleasure from her. When he sets his mouth over her clitoris she screams. She feels wild, possessed, shuddering against him as he fucks her until her body is weak and exhausted and wrought with intermittent little tremors. 

He finally relents, easing his fingers from her oversensitive pussy, gently lifting her sore legs where they are wrapped around his body and laying them on the bed. She sighs and curls toward him and he moves up the bed, taking her in his arms. Though his mouth is wet with slick and tastes of the musky core of her she finds kissing him like this surprisingly erotic. The room is warm and heavy with the hot animal scents of sweat and sex. When she arches her body against his she finds him still hard so she slips one slim arm between them and curls her hand around his cock. It is large in her hand, hot, the skin somehow delicately smooth, and when she runs her hand along its length from base to head he breathes a quiet little moan into the space between their mouths, clearly trying to keep quiet. 

“I think I screamed, before,” she says. 

“Propriety,” he says, sounding somewhat desperate, and then she moves her wrist so that she can brush her thumb over the soft head of his cock, the little drops of precome that have pearled there, and he lets out another sweet soft moan. It is possible that he has never been touched like this, as she also has not; it both saddens and thrills her to be the first to draw these sweet tremors from his sensitive body, to learn that the skin at the joints of his thighs is silken soft and that, when she brushes her fingertips across it, his whole body arches up against her. She watches his reactions from her position half atop him, straddling one thick thigh: how his head rolls against the pillows, his hair splayed beautifully against the dark sheets; how his hands carefully clutch at the bedclothes instead of her skin. 

“Touch me,” she says, impulsively. He splays his hands against her hips, pressing his fingertips into the soft pliant skin of her ass, holding her against him as she brings him to orgasm. 

He is quiet when he comes, tensing and arching and spilling hot and white over his stomach and the inside of her wrist. She tastes it, bitter and deeply salty like the sea, and when she notices he is watching her she does it again, without looking away, dragging her tongue against the inside of her own wrist. His lips move around a silent word that she suspects is blasphemous. As he lies there catching his breath she casts around for something to clean them both with and sees a handkerchief on the table beside the bed. She reaches over him for it; he touches her gently as she braces her naked body over his, her hips and stomach, the dip of her waist and the round curve of one breast. She cleans them both with the handkerchief and throws it off the side of the bed.

“Thank you,” he says. 

Byleth just looks at him for a moment: his green eyes, his tangled hair, his soft lips curving up into a little smile. “I love you,” she says. 

He stares at her, mouth slightly open. “Oh,” he finally says: he is surprised.

She sits beside him, folding her legs under her, and looks at him very seriously. “I am in love with you. That is why we are getting married.” 

“Right,” Dedue says faintly. 

“Good,” she says, and then she tucks herself up against his body so that they fit together perfectly. His arm wraps around her shoulders, holding her against his side, and she rubs her face affectionately against his chest. “Next time you should fuck me properly,” she says against his skin. 

“Byleth!” he exclaims, chest seizing under her cheek. 

She laughs and kisses the skin closest to her mouth, the slope of his pectoral cut through with the big scar. She finds herself looking forward to the future as she settles against him again, hitching one leg over his, draping her arm across his chest, and when she places her hand over his steady heartbeat he curls his fingers over hers. They will travel to Duscur together; perhaps they will have a home there, when they are both able to, and it will have a kitchen that is well stocked and a garden that is lush and verdant. Cats, she thinks, they will have cats, and there will be a fishing pond and a stable for their own horses and for guests’. There will be ample spare rooms for guests, too, and there will be a big, open dining room with a long table and wide windows that can be thrown open in the summer to let in the fresh flower-scented breeze. And their bed will not be too soft but it will not matter overly much because she will sleep soundly on it each night, beside him.


End file.
